This was written some time ago when I helped edit and publish a fanzine for the purpose of promoting a burgeoning political organization that was led by a small group of young Chicagoans.
There is a need--a need for those who remain alien to their places and their times — for change. But a change that is beyond what constitutes politics as usual. Beyond the four-year plan. And a change that entails living a life unusual. Beyond what parents, teachers and even peers project for and expect of them. They see a need for the development of new ideas, discussion and debate free from ideological hangups, as we feel that much of the Left is stagnant and offering nothing fresh or exciting; or for that matter, something effective. We have, as a product of our own internal discussion and debate, developed an all-encompassing theme, and that particular theme is LOVE.
“Love,” writes Erich Fromm, “is the only satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence.” How true. Unfortunately, the word love gets thrown around so much within today’s society that it has practically lost its real meaning. Can we actually “love” chocolate or ice cream? Overuse or constant misuse of a word tends to dilute its true meaning.
Love isn’t just something that happens; it can never be based on looks or other superficial characteristics. Loving is something that is learned, requires a lot of practice, and a hell of a lot of thought and concentration. It requires genuine insight and understanding, first of ourselves, then of our world and other people. We can not possibly hope to love others or our world if we do not first fully love ourselves. Yet most of us are unable to develop our capacities for love on the only level that really matters — a love composed of maturity, self-knowledge and courage.
Loving oneself is not necessarily an inherently narcissistic trait. Those of us who appear to be self-centered or conceited, are in fact victims of our lacking of self-love. We, in reality, hate ourselves because we are unable to care for our real self; the outside image we project is merely a feeble attempt to cover-up and compensate for the inability we have to truly love ourselves.
In the Bible, the idea of “love thy neighbor as thyself” links the love of self with the love of others. We can not separate the respect, love, and understanding we have for and of ourselves from the identical qualities of another individual. Meister Eckhart says it best:
If you love yourself, you love everybody else as you do yourself. As long as you love another person less than you love yourself, you will not really succeed in loving yourself; but if you love all alike, including yourself, you will love them as one person and that person is both God and man. Thus he is a great and righteous person who, loving himself, loves all others equally.
“When the individual feels, the community reels” is a slogan from Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World which describes a society not too unlike ours today. We all pretty much have the superficial needs of life: food, shelter and clothing; but too often we lack the needs of loving, being loved or understanding ourselves. We are alienated from our self, our fellow humans, and from the real world. We base our relationships on security, staying close to the status quo; our thoughts, feelings, and actions are indistinguishable from everybody else’s.
The ironic part of it is that in spite of this “herd mentality,” with everyone trying so hard to be as close as possible to the rest, everyone remains utterly alone. Our insecurity, anxiety, and guilt are the result of not being able to overcome our human separateness, our lack of love.
Capitalism needs people like us. We cooperate smoothly and in large numbers. We vote, fight wars, and consume more and more each year with barely a qualm being raised. Our tastes have been standardized and can be easily influenced and anticipated (an example of this would be opinion polls which do not measure public opinion but prescribe it.) It needs people who are willing to be ordered and do what is expected of them. We must fit into the social machine without much friction and be guided without force, led without leaders, prompted without aim. “Anti-social behavior” is dealt with by various means of psychotherapy and counseling. Lobotomies are a bit too unsophisticated these days.
Young people, faced with no easy answers to many of the complex problems they face today, seek escapism in the many forms of “entertainment” provided by the corporations, all too willing to make profits from the insecurity of today’s society. The false sense of happiness young people experience as a result of their research for “fun” is nothing more than mindless consumerism whereby we thoughtlessly “take in” whatever is offered to us by the media. There is no thought required to consume the many commodities served, be they sights, sounds, food, drink, cigarettes, alcohol — even people, lectures and books. What’s worse is that we see this as “just the way things are.” The world has become one great object of our consumption, which we place all of our hopes and dreams in, and we haven’t the faintest idea as to what it’s all about. It is then inevitable that we are plagued by disappointments. Our personality, our character, is geared to the consumption of commodities; “the fetishism of commodities,” as Marx defines it. The material, as well as the spiritual sides of our lives, are but objects of exchange and consumption.
Since people can not think for themselves, they can not love; robots can not love one another. We have, in essence, become automatons incapable of true feelings. We have become mirrors of a sick society that is based on consumerism, materialism, confusion and alienation. Control is quiteeasy.
If we do have this revolution, we’re all so hyped about, and the workers still want to manufacture television sets, haven’t we missed something?
A student’s so-called life…examined. Reprinted from an anarcho-punk fanzine that was edited and published by yours truly. The piece holds up pretty well, all things considered. Just remember that it was probably written by a first-year college student in the early part of the 1980's.
“An unexamined life is not worth living.” — Socrates
In today’s mass, technological society, young people’s natural energy has been channeled into “acceptable” means of expression. These “acceptable” means are maintained by our cultural and social standards….
The propaganda of commodities, in the form of advertisements on t.v. or in magazines, entices young people into the passive role of being a consumer who is unable to determine what s/he wants out of life. Young people, surrounded with images of “stars” who are supposedly “beautiful,” try to live up to society’s standards of glamour and stardom; this too destroys their ability to think about what they want out of life or what is important to them. Many young people literally destroy themselves when they chase these illusions of beauty and glamour. For example, a recent WashingtonPost article documented that 13% of the students at a West Coast high school “purged to reduce”: They found that this 13% wanted to look thin, so they took up an unhealthy practice (being thin is promoted as being “pretty” — and who doesn’t want to be “pretty,” right?) Young people learn to confirm, follow trends, etc. In this process, they subvert their ability to think about what they want out of life. Young people are made powerless and bewildered in this society.
Youth are the future of the world. They are readied for the future. Their abilities are exploited by this society to satisfy this society. Young people are socialized so they are not able to challenge their society or the future this society offers them.
The youth of this society are a huge “force” that can be used by this society. They are the future of the society, but what sort of future is there?
Young people are noticed for their buying power. They are the audience for the grand parade of “stars” that perform for them. Youth are made to accept a passive role in the music field; they are not encouraged to make their own music. The stars have a monopoly on the ability to be heard by millions of youth. By instilling this passivity amongst young people, the record industries and other forms of the entertainment industry make huge profits. The youth idolize Michael Jackson, Prince, Culture Club, or whoever the spectacle is this month, so that the culture industries have an ability to rake in the bucks. Who would buy all of the crap like t-shirts, plastic cups, records, etc. if this idolization was not instilled in them?… The cult of celebrity makes millions of people passive, while it makes a few people wealthy.
The other side of the coin is that young people need the capital to do all of this buying. Unless they are spoiled by their parents, they will have to work. They work at McDonald’s, etc. They work at unfulfilling jobs that turn them into cogs in a producing process. They accept these jobs sometimes to get into college but also to have the ability to consume. In other words, they produce shit so they can buy more shit. Thus, youth are made to accept that 40 hours a week, they will be doing something they don’t want to do. This carries on into their futures as adults.
All of this is a historical development traced by Christopher Lasch in his book, The Culture of Narcissism. He states:
The American economy, having reached the point where its technology was capable of satisfying basic material needs, now relied on the creation of new consumer demands--on convincing people to buy goods for which they are unaware of any need until the “need” is forcibly brought to their attention by the mass media…. In the period of primitive accumulation (during capitalist development), capitalism subordinated being to having, the use value of commodities to their exchange value. Now it subordinates possession itself to appearance and measures exchange value as a commodity’s capacity to confer prestige--the illusion of prosperity and well-being…. Advertising serves not so much to advertise products as to promote consumption as a way of life…. The propaganda of commodities serves a double function. First it upholds consumption as an alternative to protest or rebellion…. In the second place, the propaganda of consumption turns alienation itself into a commodity…. It not only promises to palliate all the old unhappiness to which flesh is heir: it creates or exacerbates new forms of unhappiness--personal insecurity, status anxiety, etc.
These new fears that Lasch mentions help to make a certain few wealthy. It also promises a work force for employers. Youth are trapped in the passive consumer-producer roles that advanced capitalism upholds by our culture and society.
Young people perform countless jobs. Tourist trap towns, known also as vacation spots, are often run by young people during summer break. Young people’s idealism is squashed and destroyed in such jobs. They turn to consumption for relief, and the corporations turn it into profits….
The ultimate form of chattel that young people are used for is seen during wartime. Draft age is 18, and the state needs an army of unquestioning robots to do its dirty work abroad. The most glaring example of this is the Vietnam War, in which thousands of young people were killed.
The ignorance youth have about political issues, especially why the U.S. intervenes in other countries, can be exploited by the state. If one does not have an ability to question why a war is being fought, one is more likely to fight in it. When young people are made passive by their society (as illustrated above and below), they will be willing fodder. As the Dead Kennedys warn, they’re prepared for “when ya’ get drafted….”
Young people’s ability to think clearly is damaged even further by a supposedly recent trend discovered by Nancy Reagan. This, of course, is the use of drugs and alcohol (aren’t these the same things?)
Drug use has become acceptable among many young people. The “keg party” where people get drunk “off their asses” and perhaps “laid” is now a national symbol for American students.
Drugs usually make young people apathetic. Many young people admit admit that they use drugs to escape their problems. Drugs leave young people in the dark with an inability to think. Drugs create an euphoria to live for, instead of allowing for one to face up to the problem in life. Drugs decrease young people’s awareness.
“Drugs, department stores, and television are the opiates of the masses of young people.” — Jack Travers, 1985
Another drug or diversion in life for many young people is sex. Young peoples’ sexuality and their obsession with it leads them to insecurity and self-confusion.
Young people are brainwashed by films, magazines and friends to worry about their appearance (their sexual appeal). Young people are made into narcissistic worriers. They are performers who waste time on their masks and images. They chase illusions of beauty, while not being able to think about what they need out of life. Young peoples’ fears and worries about their appearances are exploited by advertisers so that corporations make profits. Products are promoted as being helpful to improving one’s “performance in life.” And young people are made more and more insecure by the images of beauty projected in front of them. They feel, as Christopher Lasch states, that they are “performers under the constant scrutiny of friends and strangers….”
Young people are not truly encouraged to become educated in this society. This society does not want or need creative, thoughtful people. These sort of people would not make for a reliance upon experts that people have today. “Pseudo-needs” are created within people to make them buy things and work to make capital so as to make an appearance of “happiness.” What aspect of our culture encourages young people to think or gives them the desire to become educated? Television, which an average young person watches a hell of a lot of — 20,000 hours by the time s/he graduates from high school — does not encourage thinking. It encourages a short attention span and manufactures a want (desire?) to buy. The desire to make money does not mean that one will learn anything. It means that people want to devise ways in which to strike it rich, usually going to business school. Education is seen as a means to making oneself rich. There is no longer a need to have knowledge of political, literary, or sociological history; all that matters is the ability to become wealthy.
Consumer society is in need of ignorant and powerless people, not educated ones. Youth are channeled into consumer society to wind up being obsessed with their personal drive for wealth, not becoming intelligent. Education is doomed within the present society….
Young people form cliques in school. They become separated into various in-groups. Countless trends create in and out groups, by which young people are made to hate other young people. There are always the jocks, the punks, the preppies, etc. All of these divisions mean that young people are less able to realize that they are oppressed.
Many young people chase illusions of consumer bliss, yuppie happiness, or whatever one wants to label it. They are channeled into “acceptable” roles of behavior….
They wear certain clothes, they listen to certain music, they work pathetic jobs, and they fight other peoples’ wars.
It is all in the best interest of other people. It allows for other people to maintain their positions of power and wealth (the two are usually interchangeable in a capitalist society).
The corporations profit with the help of their advertising cronies, employers profit by having a passive labor force, the government has a mass of unquestioning and apathetic young people who will fight wars and not threaten the status quo.
This is all done at the cost of young people and at the cost of their ability to think. Youth are made into passive and insecure spectators, all by the will of their implanted ignorance, all for the profit of a few.
Written by Kevin Mattson, a political and social activist, living in Bethesda, MD.
***I’m always open to hearing your thoughts on anything you read here, positive or negative; or if you just want to say hello. My email is jjankow63@gmail.com Thank you for bothering!***
Angry about all that packaging? Irritated by all those commercials? Worried about the quality of the “mental environment”? Well, join the club. Anti-consumerism has become one of the most important cultural forces in millennial North American life, across every social class and demographic.
This might seem at odds with the economic facts of the 1990s — a decade that gave us the “extreme shopping” channel, the dot-com bubble, and an absurd orgy of indulgence in ever more luxurious consumer goods. But look at the non-fiction bestseller lists. For years they’ve been dominated by books that are deeply critical of consumerism: No Logo, Culture Jam, Luxury Fever and Fast Food Nation. You can now buy Adbusters at your neighbourhood music or clothing store. Two of the most popular and critically successful films in recent memory were Fight Club and American Beauty, which offer almost identical indictments of modern consumer society.
What can we conclude from all this? For one thing, the market obviously does an extremely good job at responding to consumer demand for anti-consumerist products and literature. But isn’t that a contradiction? Doesn’t it suggest that we are in the grip of some massive, society-wide, bipolar disorder? How can we all denounce consumerism, and yet still find ourselves living in a consumer society?
The answer is simple. What we see in films like American Beauty and Fight Club is not actually a critique of consumerism; it’s merely a restatement of the “critique of mass society” that has been around since the 1950s. The two are not the same. In fact, the critique of mass society has been one of the most powerful forces driving consumerism for more than 40 years.
That last sentence is worth reading again. The idea is so foreign, so completely the opposite of what we are used to being told, that many people simply can’t get their head around it. It is a position that Thomas Frank, editor of The Baffler, has been trying to communicate for years. Strangely, all the authors of anti-consumerism books have read Frank — most even cite him approvingly — and yet not one of them seems to get the point. So here is Frank’s claim, simply put: books like No Logo, magazines like Adbusters, and movies like American Beauty do not undermine consumerism; they reinforce it.
This isn’t because the authors, directors or editors are hypocrites. It’s because they’ve failed to understand the true nature of consumer society.
*
One of the most talked-about cinematic set-pieces in recent memory is the scene in Fight Club where the nameless narrator (Ed Norton) pans his empty apartment, furnishing it piece by piece with Ikea furniture. The scene shimmers and pulses with prices, model numbers and product names, as if Norton’s gaze was drag-and-dropping straight out of a virtual catalogue. It is a great scene, driving the point home: the furniture of his world is mass-produced, branded, sterile. If we are what we buy, then the narrator is an Allen-key-wielding corporate-conformist drone.
In many ways, this scene is just a cgi-driven update of the opening pages of John Updike’s Rabbit, Run. After yet another numbing day selling the MagiPeel Kitchen Peeler, Harry Angstrom comes home to his pregnant and half-drunk wife whom he no longer loves. Harry takes off in his car, driving aimlessly south. As he tries to sort out his life, the music on the radio, the sports reports, the ads, the billboards, all merge in his consciousness into one monotonous, monolithic brandscape.
It may give us pause to consider that while Fight Club was hailed as “edgy” and “subversive” when it appeared in 1999, Rabbit, Run enjoyed enormous commercial success when it was first published — in 1960. If social criticism came with a “sell by” date, this one would have been removed from the shelf a long time ago. The fact that it is still around, and still provokes awe and acclaim, makes one wonder if it is really a criticism or, rather, a piece of modern mythology.
What Fight Club and Rabbit, Run present, in a user-friendly fashion, is the critique of mass society, which was developed in the late 1950s in classic works like William Whyte’s The Organization Man (1956), Vance Packard’s The Status Seekers (1959) and Paul Goodman’s Growing up Absurd (1960). The central idea is quite simple. Capitalism requires conformity to function correctly. As a result, the system is based upon a generalized system of repression. Individuals who resist the pressure to conform therefore subvert the system, and aid in its overthrow.
This theory acquired such a powerful grip on the imagination of the left during the 1960s that many people still have difficulty seeing it for what it is — a theory. Here are a few of its central postulates:
1. Capitalism requires conformity in the workers. Capitalism is one big machine; the workers are just parts. These parts need to be as simple, predictable, and interchangeable as possible. One need only look at an assembly line to see why. Like bees or ants, capitalist workers need to be organized into a limited number of homogeneous castes.
2. Capitalism requires conformity of education. Training these corporate drones begins in the schools, where their independence and creativity is beaten out of them — literally and figuratively. Call this the Pink Floyd theory of education.
3. Capitalism requires sexual repression. In its drive to stamp out individuality, capitalism denies the full range of human expression, which includes sexual freedom. Because sexuality is erratic and unpredictable, it is a threat to the established order. This is why some people thought the sexual revolution would undermine capitalism.
4. Capitalism requires conformity of consumption. The overriding goal of capitalism is to achieve ever-increasing profits through economies of scale. These are best achieved by having everyone consume the same limited range of standardized goods. Enter advertising, which tries to inculcate false or inauthentic desires. Consumerism is what emerges when we are duped into having desires that we would not normally have.
*
Both Fight Club and American Beauty are thoroughly soaked in the critique of mass society. Let’s look at Fight Club.
Here’s the narrator’s alter ego, Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), explaining the third thesis: “We’re designed to be hunters and we’re in a society of shopping. There’s nothing to kill anymore, there’s nothing to fight, nothing to overcome, nothing to explore. In that social emasculation this everyman is created.” And the fourth: “Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate, so we can buy shit we don’t need.” And here he is giving the narrator a scatological summary of the whole critique: “You’re not your job. You’re not how much money you have in the bank. You’re not the car you drive. You’re not the contents of your wallet. You’re not your fucking khakis. You’re the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world.”
Fight Club is entirely orthodox in its Rousseauian rejection of the modern order. Less orthodox is its proffered solution, which in the middle and final acts moves swiftly from Iron John to the Trenchcoat Mafia.
A more conventional narrative arc, combined with a more didactic presentation of the critique, can be found in American Beauty, the Oscar-winning companion piece to Fight Club. The two films offer identical takes on the homogenizing and emasculating effects of mass society, though the heroes differ in their strategies of resistance. Fight Club suggests that the only solution is to blow up the whole machine; in American Beauty, Lester (Kevin Spacey) decides to subvert it from within.
When Lester first starts to rebel against his grey-scale, cookie-cutter life, he begins by mocking his wife’s (Annette Bening) Martha Stewart materialism. Here’s Lester in a voice-over: “That’s my wife, Carolyn. See the way the handle on her pruning shears matches her gardening clogs? That’s not an accident.”
Later, Carolyn halts Lester’s sexual advances in order to prevent him from spilling beer on the couch. They fight. “It’s just a couch,” Lester says. Carolyn: “This is a $4,000 sofa upholstered in Italian silk. It is not just a couch.” Lester: “It’s just a couch!” Capitalism offers us consumer goods as a substitute for sexual gratification. Lester strains at the bit.
The relationship between sexual frustration and mass society is a general theme of the movie. Here is Lester giving his family theses one and three over dinner:
Carolyn: Your father and I were just discussing his day at work. Why don’t you tell our daughter about it, honey?
Lester: Janie, today I quit my job. And then I told my boss to go fuck himself, and then I blackmailed him for almost $60,000. Pass the asparagus.
Carolyn: Your father seems to think this type of behaviour is something to be proud of.
Lester: And your mother seems to prefer I go through life like a fucking prisoner while she keeps my dick in a mason jar under the sink.
So what does Lester do to reassert his individuality, his masculinity? He takes a new job. He starts working out. He lusts after, then seduces, his daughter’s friend. He starts smoking pot in the afternoon. In short, he rejects all of the demands that society makes on a man of his age. But does he stop consuming? Of course not. Consider the scene in which he buys a new car. Carolyn comes home and asks Lester whose car that is in the driveway. Lester: “Mine. 1970 Pontiac Firebird. The car I’ve always wanted and now I have it. I rule!”
Lester has thrown off the shackles of conformist culture. He’s grown a dick, become a man again. All because he bought a car. Carolyn’s couch may be “just a couch,” but his car is much more than “just a car.” Lester has become the ultimate consumer. Like a teenager, he consumes without guilt, without foresight, and without responsibility. Meanwhile, Carolyn’s questions about how he intends to make the mortgage payments are dismissed as merely one more symptom of her alienated existence. Lester is beyond all that. He is now what Thomas Frank calls “the rebel consumer.”
*
What American Beauty illustrates, with extraordinary clarity, is that rebelling against mass society is not the same thing as rebelling against consumer society. Through his rebellion, Lester goes from being right-angle square to dead cool. This is reflected in his consumption choices. Apart from the new car, he develops a taste for very expensive marijuana — $2,000 an ounce, we are told, and very good. “This is all I ever smoke,” his teenaged dealer assures him. Welcome to the club, where admission is restricted to clients with the most discriminating taste. How is this any different from Frasier and Niles at their wine club?
What we need to see is that consumption is not about conformity, it’s about distinction. People consume in order to set themselves apart from others. To show that they are cooler (Nike shoes), better connected (the latest nightclub), better informed (single-malt Scotch), morally superior (Guatemalan handcrafts), or just plain richer (bmws).
The problem is that all of these comparative preferences generate competitive consumption. “Keeping up with the Joneses,” in today’s world, does not always mean buying a tract home in the suburbs. It means buying a loft downtown, eating at the right restaurants, listening to obscure bands, having a pile of Mountain Equipment Co-op gear and vacationing in Thailand. It doesn’t matter how much people spend on these things, what matters is the competitive structure of the consumption. Once too many people get on the bandwagon, it forces the early adopters to get off, in order to preserve their distinction. This is what generates the cycles of obsolescence and waste that we condemn as “consumerism.”
Many people who are, in their own minds, opposed to consumerism nevertheless actively participate in the sort of behaviour that drives it. Consider Naomi Klein. She starts out No Logo by decrying the recent conversion of factory buildings in her Toronto neighbourhood into “loft living” condominiums. She makes it absolutely clear to the reader that her place is the real deal, a genuine factory loft, steeped in working-class authenticity, yet throbbing with urban street culture and a “rock-video aesthetic.”
Now of course anyone who has a feel for how social class in this country works knows that, at the time Klein was writing, a genuine factory loft in the King-Spadina area was possibly the single most exclusive and desirable piece of real estate in Canada. Unlike merely expensive neighbourhoods in Toronto, like Rosedale and Forest Hill, where it is possible to buy your way in, genuine lofts could only be acquired by people with superior social connections. This is because they contravened zoning regulations and could not be bought on the open market. Only the most exclusive segment of the cultural elite could get access to them.
Unfortunately for Klein, zoning changes in Toronto (changes that were part of a very enlightened and successful strategy to slow urban sprawl) allowed yuppies to buy their way into her neighbourhood. This led to an erosion of her social status. Her complaints about commercialization are nothing but an expression of this loss of distinction. What she fails to observe is that this distinction is precisely what drives the real estate market, what creates the value in these dwellings. People buy these lofts because they want a piece of Klein’s social status. Naturally, she is not amused. They are, after all, her inferiors — an inferiority that they demonstrate through their willingness to accept mass-produced, commercialized facsimiles of the “genuine” article.
Klein claims these newcomers bring “a painful new self-consciousness” to the neighbourhood. But as the rest of her introduction demonstrates, she is also conscious — painfully so — of her surroundings. Her neighbourhood is one where “in the twenties and thirties Russian and Polish immigrants darted back and forth on these streets, ducking into delis to argue about Trotsky and the leadership of the international ladies’ garment workers’ union.” Emma Goldman, we are told, “the famed anarchist and labour organizer,” lived on her street! How exciting for Klein! What a tremendous source of distinction that must be.
Klein suggests that she may be forced to move out of her loft when the landlord decides to convert the building to condominiums. But wait a minute. If that happens, why doesn’t she just buy her loft? The problem, of course, is that a loft-living condominium doesn’t have quite the cachet of a “genuine” loft. It becomes, as Klein puts it, merely an apartment with “exceptionally high ceilings.” It is not her landlord, but her fear of losing social status that threatens to drive Klein from her neighbourhood.
Here we can see the forces driving competitive consumption in their purest and most unadulterated form.
*
Once we acknowledge the role that distinction plays in structuring consumption, it’s easy to see why people care about brands so much. Brands don’t bring us together, they set us apart. Of course, most sophisticated people claim that they don’t care about brands — a transparent falsehood. Most people who consider themselves “anti-consumerist” are extremely brand-conscious. They are able to fool themselves into believing that they don’t care because their preferences are primarily negative. They would never be caught dead driving a Chrysler or listening to Celine Dion. It is precisely by not buying these uncool items that they establish their social superiority. (It is also why, when they do consume “mass society” products, they must do so “ironically” — so as to preserve their distinction.)
As Pierre Bourdieu reminds us, taste is first and foremost distaste — disgust and “visceral intolerance” of the taste of others. This makes it easy to see how the critique of mass society could help drive consumerism. Take, for example, Volkswagen and Volvo advertising from the early 1960s. Both automakers used the critique of “planned obsolescence” quite prominently in their advertising campaigns. The message was clear: buy from the big Detroit automakers and show everyone that you’re a dupe, a victim of consumerism; buy our car and show people that you’re too smart to be duped by advertising, that you’re wise to the game.
This sort of “anti-advertising” was enormously successful in the 1960s, transforming the VW bug from a Nazi car into the symbol of the hippie counterculture and making the Volvo the car of choice for an entire generation of leftist academics. Similar advertising strategies are just as successful today, and are used to sell everything from breakfast cereal to clothing. Thus the kind of ad parodies that we find in Adbusters, far from being subversive, are indistinguishable from many genuine ad campaigns. Flipping through the magazine, one cannot avoid thinking back to Frank’s observation that “business is amassing great sums by charging admission to the ritual simulation of its own lynching.”
*
We find ourselves in an untenable situation On the one hand, we criticize conformity and encourage individuality and rebellion. On the other hand, we lament the fact that our ever-increasing standard of material consumption is failing to generate any lasting increase in happiness. This is because it is rebellion, not conformity, that generates the competitive structure that drives the wedge between consumption and happiness. As long as we continue to prize individuality, and as long as we express that individuality through what we own and where we live, we can expect to live in a consumerist society.
It is tempting to think that we could just drop out of the race, become what Harvard professor Juliet Schor calls “downshifters.” That way we could avoid competitive consumption entirely. Unfortunately, this is wishful thinking. We can walk away from some competitions, take steps to mitigate the effects of others, but many more simply cannot be avoided.
In many cases, competition is an intrinsic feature of the goods that we consume. Economists call these “positional goods” — goods that one person can have only if many others do not. Examples include not only penthouse apartments, but also wilderness hikes and underground music. It is often claimed that a growing economy is like the rising tide that lifts all boats. But a growing economy does not create more antiques, more rare art, or more downtown real estate, it just makes them more expensive. Many of us fail to recognize how much of our consumption is devoted to these positional goods.
Furthermore, we are often forced into competitive consumption, just to defend ourselves against the nuisances generated by other people’s consumption. It is unreasonable, for example, for anyone living in a Canadian city to own anything other than a small, fuel-efficient car. At the same time, in many parts of the North America, the number of big SUVs on the road has reached the point where people are forced to think twice before buying a small car. The SUVs make the roads so dangerous for other drivers that everyone has to consider buying a larger car just to protect themselves.
This is why expecting people to opt out is often unrealistic; the cost to the individual is just too high. It’s all well and good to say that SUVs are a danger and shouldn’t be on the road. But saying so doesn’t change anything. The fact is that SUVs are on the road, and they’re not about to disappear anytime soon. So are you willing to endanger your children’s lives by buying a subcompact?
Because so much of our competitive consumption is defensive in nature, people feel justified in their choices. Unfortunately, everyone who participates contributes just as much to the problem, regardless of his or her intentions. It doesn’t matter that you bought the SUV to protect yourself and your children, you still bought it, and you still made it harder for other drivers to opt out of the automotive arms race. When it comes to consumerism, intentions are irrelevant. It is only consequences that count.
This is why a society-wide solution to the problem of consumerism is not going to occur through personal or cultural politics. At this stage of late consumerism, our best bet is legislative action. If we were really worried about advertising, for example, it would be easy to strike a devastating blow against the “brand bullies” with a simple change in the tax code. The government could stop treating advertising expenditures as a fully tax-deductible business expense (much as it did with entertainment expenses several years ago). Advertising is already a separately itemized expense category, so the change wouldn’t even generate any additional paperwork. But this little tweak to the tax code would have a greater impact than all of the culture jamming in the world.
Of course, tweaking the tax code is not quite as exciting as dropping a “meme bomb” into the world of advertising or heading off to the latest riot in all that cool mec gear. It may, however, prove to be a lot more useful. What we need to realize is that consumerism is not an ideology. It is not something that people get tricked into. Consumerism is something that we actively do to one another, and that we will continue to do as long as we have no incentive to stop. Rather than just posturing, we should start thinking a bit more carefully about how we’re going to provide those incentives.
The Rebel Sell will appear in book-length this September from HarperCollins. Click here to order a copy from Amazon.com
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